A very geographical crisis: the making and breaking of the 2007-2008 financial crisis

Abstract

The paper argues that the origins of the financial crisis of 2007--2008 can ultimately be located in four spaces: in international financial centres, in particular, in the longstanding competition that has existed between London and New York; in the insularity of the everyday geographies of money that have emerged in such centres in the wake of the apparent hegemony of financialization; in the geographical recycling of surpluses and deficits and, more particularly, the structural dependency that has grown up between China and the USA, and, finally; in the growing power of the financial media, centred in international financial centres and an increasingly significant agent in performing money and the economy in general, and in engendering mimetic forms of rationality. Copyright 2009, Oxford University Press.